‘The LEGO Movie’ vs. ‘The Monuments Men’ at Weekend Box Office

Update:Box Office Mojo’s report for weekend earnings at the box office has the LEGO Movie way up top with $69.1 million pulled in Friday and Saturday, exceeding the film’s budget by $9 milllion.The total amounted to more than half of the earnings that Ride Along took in a full four weeks, including three weeks at No. 1 in the box office. The Monuments Men came in second at the weekend box office and took a much smaller — but decent — $22.7 million. It will still be a little while before the Monuments Men makes up for its $70 million budget.

As the continued success story of Kevin Hart and Ice Cube’s critically-panned but fan-loved Ride Along nears its inevitable fall from the top of the box office charts, a new contender is stepping up to the plate and bringing with it brand recognition that will hit home with multiple generations — LEGO.

While many of us grew up with the miniature plastic bricks forming everything from castles and dungeons, to cities and police cars, to sub-aquatic bases with complex submarines for mining shiny plastic crystals from the bottom of the living room, the LEGO universe has been expanding in recent years.

No longer is the LEGO brand limited to just plastic bricks. In the past decade, LEGO has been popping up consistently in well-reviewed video games — willfully ignoring the older LEGO Island video games. As franchises like Star Wars had their toys successfully LEGO-ized, it only made sense to take the next step and have video games based on those franchises also brushed over with a bit of LEGO style. The result was comical and cute versions of games that actually turned out fun.

LEGO Star Wars kicked off the brand’s deep delve into video games, and it received a Metacritic score of 77. The games successors, LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, and LEGO Stars Wars III: The Clone Wars also received high reviews from Metacritic– 81, 80, and 75, respectively. The entire set of those four games had sold over 30 million copies as of January 2013, Gamespot reports.

The brand branched out even further to include Indiana Jones titles and many DC superheroes as well. LEGO Batman: The Game was another notable title with good reviews. With all the success and brand recognition, it almost makes one wonder what took the company so long in making a movie.